Arthur Albert Dawson Bayldon, poet, was born on 20 March 1865 at Leeds, Yorkshire, England, son of Charles Henry Bayldon, solicitor, and Matilda Maria, née Dawson. As a student at Leeds Grammar School, he won prizes for swimming, and developed an appreciation of poetry through the scholar J. R. Tutin. His parents having died while he was young, he travelled widely in Europe and, he claimed, in the United States of America and India. In his early twenties he published two volumes of verse which, in their conventional evocation of delight and despair, display a bookish regard for nineteenth-century English poets and an attraction towards Victorian Romantic diction.

A Woman's Mood

I think to-night I could bear it all, Even the arrow that cleft the core, -- Could I wait again for your swift footfall, And your sunny face coming in at the door. With the old frank look and the gay young smile, And the ring of the words you used to say; I could almost deem the pain worth while, To greet you again in the olden way!

But you stand without in the dark and cold, And I may not open the long closed door, Nor call thro' the night, with the love of ...